1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a similarity analyzing device, an image display device for displaying a list of picked-up images, an image display program storage medium, and an image display method, for analyzing the degree of similarity between plural faces.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, image pick-up devices can be carried with ease because most compact equipment such as mobile phones and the like, which are carried at all times, have an image pick-up device mounted thereon in addition to that digital cameras are rapidly made compact. Since image pick-up devices mounted on digital cameras and compact equipment can acquire digital picked-up images, the picked-up images can be instantly displayed on a liquid crystal display in a field and the like for confirmation, and unnecessary picked-up images can be deleted before they are printed out. Further, when plural picked-up images are collectively recorded to a recording medium and the like, the picked-up images can be stored in high image quality without taking up much space.
As a method of effectively putting picked-up images in order, applications for album are widely used to put them in order using personal computers. The personal computers are advantageous in that they can store a lot of picked-up images without paying any heed to a remaining capacity because they have a large capacity hard disc device images and that a job for copying picked-up images and attaching them to an electronic mail and the like can be easily carried out.
Further, in the field of an image processing, a scene analyzing technique for analyzing an image pick-up scene in which an image is being picked-up, a face extracting technique for extracting a face being picked up, and the like are widely known, and further, in the field of the applications for album, an additional function, to which the scene analyzing technique and the face extracting technique are applied, is being developed. As to this point, there is devised an image display method in which when a face image is previously registered, a picked-up image, on which a face which resembles the registered face is picked up, is searched from a lot of picked-up images stored in a hard disc device and the like and displayed (for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication Nos. 2006-314010 and 2004-172849). According to the image display method, even if a lot of picked-up images are stored, a picked-up image on which a friend, a family, and the like are picked up can be easily searched and attached to an e-mail and the like, thereby a communication can be improved.
The face extracting technique described above and the like ordinarily extracts a face by searching an image portion having a characteristic shape in a picked-up image such as eyes, a nose, a mouth, and the like. Therefore, there are problems such as one that when it is intended to search, for example, a picked-up image on which a daughter is picked up, even a picked-up image of her mother whose face in her early days resembles that of the daughter in the respective portions of the face is also searched, and another one that it is difficult to discriminate babies having a roundish shape in the respective portions of their faces from each other.